How's the Flu Hitting You?

Jay's post said "you're pretty much [on your] own with this particular
strain", and that's simply not true. The vaccine IS helpful for some
percentage of people.

The basic misunderstanding driving this particular argumentative string seems
to be the idea that there's one flu germ, or shot.

It's a prevalent bug, and a particularly evil one -- it evolves all the time.
Like many of the most "successful" viruses, influenza can ride around in people
who are only kind of sick, and jump from that reservoir to lots of other new
victims, unlike ebola which kills you fast and burns its own bridges,
infectively speaking.

(incidentally, it's also a zoonosis -- a germ that can infect both people and
several kinds of animals, and often being able to jump that species barrier
helps it spread and evolve even more)

New variants appear all the time, and there's a recognized pattern to its
winter spread across the globe, so health organizations each year try to scout
out the most likely ones and make up a new vaccine that includes them all. You
can't put dozens of different strains into one shot, so you try for the few
that are most likely to be the major culprits. This year, for reasons already
explained, they included several in the new vaccine but missed one variety, and
that's turned out to be a big bad one.

Just as a doc might give you a shot of antibiotic to prevent secondary
infections like pneumonia if your immune system's pretty wiped out, (you DO
know that antibiotics don't work against a virus) the vaccine could protect
even those who get flu from getting other varieties...wouldn't it bite to get
bit all over again?

And the more people who develop their own immunity to the latest strain of flu,
the most likely the darn thing is to go out and evolve:
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releas...-rme032503.php

"Strains of flu virus differ from one another largely in the genes that code
for surface molecules called glycoproteins, which are the primary targets of
the body's immune system in defending against flu viruses.... Evolutionary
changes in immune response against such "antigen" molecules are the reason that
new vaccines must be developed against emerging strains of virus."

Me, I'm livin' dangerously -- no shot, just Vitamin C, warm clothes, and
occasional applications of medicinal barley water.